‘King of Glory’ Moves to Fight Addiction, Limits U-12 Players to One Hour

Tencent Games announced a pilot program for its King of Glory online game that would log out players younger than 12 after one hour of daily gameplay, the company said on July 2.

In the most strict anti-addiction measure ever taken in Chinese gaming, King of Glory will count cumulative play time throughout the day, issuing reminders to players and eventually forcing them to log out.

Minors 12 years old or younger are allowed to play only 1 hour per day and cannot sign in after 9 pm. Minors older than 12 are allowed to play for 2 hours per day. Players who exceed the time limit will be forced to log out.

Tencent‘s latest update to King of Glory was released on July 4 after a month of debugging and internal testing. The release added three measures to control addiction: it restricts the login duration for minors, upgrades the platform for minors’ growth and strengthens the identity verification system.

In addition to limiting the game time, King of Glory will gradually increase “consumption quotas” to curb the irrational use by minors.

King of Glory quickly became a hit online after its initial release, gaining many users. “But we are also concerned. If adolescents lack sufficient self-control, they might spent too much time in the game and disrupt their studies and life,” the head of development for King of Glory said, “The game itself brings happiness, but excessive gaming will not bring happiness to ourselves or parents. We wanted to adopt more stringent controls.”

In February 2017, Tencent launched its guardian platform to assist parents in monitoring their children’s game accounts.

Tencent‘s head of gaming said the upgraded protections would dramatically reduce the operating threshold, and that parents only need to take a few steps to bing their accounts to monitor their children’s play time and payments. The platform adds a hardware device binding function to prevent minors from logging in and playing on multiple accounts. It also enables parents to stop their child from gaming on a designated device with one click.

Since April, King of Glory has been prompting users to register with their real identity using the official website and client. Tencent‘s upcoming anti-addiction measures further strengthen this identity authentication system.

“The health of minors is a long-term concern and a focus of our engineering at Tencent. We will continue to explore, and to create a healthy network environment for young people with other social sectors,” the Tencent spokesman said, “We also urge parents to spend more time with their children so that they can experience warmth and love as they grow.”

This story originally appeared in Nanfang Metropolis Daily and was translated by Pandaily.

Click here to read the original Chinese article.